From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the history of American linguistics (review)

We do not count sustained historical reflection among the many virtues of contemporary American linguistics. Of course this is unfortunate for any discipline because we lose knowledge about significant findings and the relationships between theories. But it is especially unfortunate in our particular case, in that the complex development of linguistics and its relationships with other disciplines has been obscured almost entirely, allowing a version of linguistic history to develop that has been called ‘ludicrously mistaken’ in one of the only serious volumes on the subject to date (Hymes & Fought 1981).

Indeed, as Hymes and Fought have shown so persuasively, like many key terms in contemporary intellectual practice, the terms ‘American’ and ‘structuralism’ must be understood as sites of contestation, so that today much of contemporary linguistics considers the entire question of structural methodology to be essentially moot. Hymes and Fought argue convincingly that contemporary linguistic practice, especially formal linguistics, must in many ways be understood as profoundly structuralist. That it disavows this name is part of much high structuralist strategy, and this is one of the historical threads that Joseph takes up in his recent volume. But it is not just the relationship of contemporary linguistics to its structuralist past that J calls into question: it is the relationship of linguistic practice to historical understanding itself.

For those who have been following the threads of J’s argument, let out in fascinating tidbits over a decade or more (and in earlier volumes including Joseph 1987 and Joseph & Taylor 1990), some of this will at least be familiar; but for those not acquainted with nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and European linguistic history first-hand (or through a skeptical and thorough overview such as that of Hymes and Fought), the volume under review emerges as something like an indictment of recent American linguistics for the obliteration of its own history, as both a methodological prescription and no less a practice. Thus J shows that we have been, in general (and even when compared to other humanistic and social-scientific disciplines like philosophy, English, political science, and so on), particularly resistant to history in contemporary American linguistic practice; thus, paradoxically, what is understood as linguistic theory can in fact be construed as ‘propaganda’ in a most remarkable way (196).

J’s perspective is described in more general terms in the first third of the volume. In Chs. 1 through 3, J shows how complex and ultimately ideological are any assessments of the very identity of ‘American’ linguistics, given the international background and training of so many of its main figures (e.g. William Dwight Whitney, Hans Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson). Just as complex and no less political is the question of an ‘American’ language, from the identity of the major standard language to that of the many languages spoken by the continent’s indigenous peoples. Many in the US may find it hard to believe that at its inception, the country was seen as deficient for lacking a language distinct from England, an anxiety directly connected to the lack of a deep historical past like the countries of the Old World. J suggests, at least obliquely, that such anxiety seems displaced onto the persistence of ahistoricism in contemporary linguistic work, and more generally in attitudes toward language in the US.

J exposes a great deal that is previously unknown about Ferdinand de Saussure’s place in the formation of American thought about language. J’s work is distinguished by thoughtful and occasionally startling use of archival material, and in this case he has uncovered a letter from Saussure to Whitney, dated April 7, 1879, mentioning the fact that they had met in Berlin three days earlier. This provides even stronger reason than we had before to suppose, as J writes, that Whitney’s Life and growth of language (1875) influenced Saussure most...